Republican race turns to Mississippi and Alabama

9.30am: Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the Republican presidential race, which takes a turn for the south ahead of polls in Mississippi and Alabama next week. Here's Ryan Devereaux's summary of where we're at today:

The Republican presidential hopefuls are turning their attention to the south with primaries in Mississippi and Alabama coming up next week. Pressure has mounted to push Newt Gingrich out of the race and make room for Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney to duke it out. Santorum, for his part, has denied any involvement in any such efforts but has says he wouldn't mind if it happened. Speaking in Mississippi yesterday, Santorum said, ""If you deliver a victory for us on Tuesday, you will make this a two-person race."

Newt Gingrich is also refusing to back down, though he has scrapped plans to campaign in Kansas, which is holding caucuses on Saturday. Following a victory in his home state of Georgia Tuesday, Gingrich has chosen to focus exclusively on Alabama and Mississippi.

Mitt Romney has won the support of Alabama's largest newspaper. On Wednesday the Birmingham News endorsed the former Massachusetts governor as "the best bet" for defeating President Obama. Recent polling by Alabama State University's Center for Leadership and Public Policy has Rick Santorum leading Romney with the support of 22.7% of likely voters, to 18.7% for Romney. Gingrich, meanwhile, trails with 13.8%.

The Obama campaign plans to release a 17-minute documentary detailing the president's first term in office. The film is directed by David Guggenheim, the man behind Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth.

GOP strategist Karl Rove has predicted the battle for the Republican nomination will take "months, not weeks". Writing in his Wall Street Journal column on Wednesday, Rove said "Every Republican running for president got something on Super Tuesday. Not all they wanted, but enough to convince themselves to carry on, making it likely the GOP race goes on for months, not weeks."

That's an interesting way of looking at the Republican nomination and is a strong argument for the notion that Mitt Romney failed to live up to his front-runner status on Super Tuesday, despite massive wins in Massachusetts and Virginia, two big states.

It would be one thing if Romney were eking out narrow victories against Rick Perry or Tim Pawlenty, candidates with (at the time they were running) a serious campaign infrastructure and money or the potential for it. But it's another thing to narrowly win against candidates who don't have a true organization, who aren't well funded, and who don't have a bustling campaign headquarters.

How, for example, did Rick Santorum win North Dakota? That remains a mystery, since it seems unlikely that he had much of a political operation there.

Here's Prof Sabato's thoughts about 24 April, one date that may mark Mitt Romney's emergence as victor and Republican party nominee, after primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island:

Of all the remaining days on the nominating calendar, this is the one best suited to Mr Romney's politics. Four of the five races in this Northeastern bunch – all but Pennsylvania – should almost automatically go to the former Massachusetts governor, who can expect to win most of their delegates.

Pennsylvania, where Rick Santorum's served 16 years in public office, will dominate press coverage leading up to the April 24 primaries. That race, like the recent one in Michigan, will consume three full weeks and the pressure will be on favorite son Mr Santorum. Pennsylvania has some demographic similarities to Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, which could produce a close contest if Mr Romney chooses to spend heavily. Anything but a clear victory will hurt Mr Santorum, especially given his landslide re-election loss in 2006 and fears that he couldn't carry Pennsylvania in the general election.

Few events could end the GOP contest suddenly, but a Santorum defeat in Pennsylvania, coupled with a Romney sweep of the other April 24 states, is one of them.

Unrelated: Larry Sabato has the finest moustache seen on US television.

10.47am: So where are we? Oh yes, Alabama and Mississippi next Tuesday, but let's not forget Hawaii or Kansas, which caucuses on Saturday.

The statewide poll conducted by Alabama State University's Center for Leadership and Public Policy showed 22.7% of likely Republican voters supported Santorum, who is scheduled to make campaign appearances Thursday in Huntsville and Mobile.

Former Massachussetts Governor Mitt Romney trailed Santorum with 18.7%, followed by Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House from neighboring Georgia, with 13.8%.

The telephone poll of 470 likely GOP voters showed 29.8% undecided and 15% saying they intended to support other candidates. The poll did not ask voters whether they supported Ron Paul, the Texas congressman seeking the GOP nomination.

Caveat: this poll was taken on 1 March, long before Super Tuesday.

And here's another slightly elderly poll from Alabama putting Romney in the lead, from the Alabama Education Association's Capital Survey Research Center.

It found Romney leading with 31.2%, followed by Santorum with 21.6%, Gingrich with 21% and Paul with 6.5%. A total of 19.8% said they were undecided.

11.09am: Newt Gingrich, in between fending off calls for him to end his campaign, is rampaging around Alabama telling voters that not only will he reduce gas prices to $2.50 a gallon but that the "drill baby drill" policy he wants will also pay off the federal debt. Awesome.

Gingrich contends that the solution to rising energy costs is to open up more drilling on the Gulf Coast, more drilling in Alaska and more drilling on federal lands.

He said just the royalties that the federal government could obtain from the latter would be $16 to $18 trillion, which would be enough to pay off the federal deficit.

"And we send $500 billion oversees for energy now, imagine the jobs we could create if we kept those funds at home," he said.

Hold on – $16 to $18 trillion? That's insane.

11.31am: For the next crucial result, Republican eyes turn to ... Guam? Yes, in another sign of the desperation that the GOP bunfight has become, the candidates are actually worrying about Guam's nine delegates to the nominating convention.

Now, Mitt doesn't really do passion but he's trying his best to simulate it. But the net effect is that he appears to need to visit the bathroom urgently. Here's a more elegant description:

[Romney] pants, as if he's speaking against the clock in a high-school debating competition and has to get all his facts and figures out before the siren goes. And therein lies his problem. He's got his eye on the clock - and has done since 2007 – and not on his audience.

12.14pm: Here is the trailer – yes, the trailer, that's not at all precious – for the 17-minute-long mini-documentary about the Obama presidency that the Obama campaign is punting.

The Romney campaign put out word yesterday that the candidate raised $11.5m in February. Today they've released the number we were really waiting for, announcing Romney has $7.3m in the bank.

That's a slight dip from the end of January, when Romney had $7.7m on hand. At the end of December, Romney's war chest stood at some $19m.

So $11.5m plus $400,000 equals $11.9m, and $7.3m on hand with no debt isn't a bad position to be in for Romney, thanks to his affiliated Super Pac picking up the tab for all the expensive TV ads. Still, maybe he should have spent some of those millions on putting more effort into Okalhoma and Tennessee and wrapping this thing up.

The "evolution," as one adviser described it, marks a significant shift away from a previous posture marked by relative inaccessibility to top campaign officials and periodic emails from the campaign's high command questioning the professionalism of reporters who authored stories or tweets with which the campaign disagreed.

Prior to the new, informal initiative the campaign's press aides routinely ignored e-mails and phone calls from reporters, even on the most routine matters.

His critics argue that he never should have fallen behind an opponent such as Santorum, that the success of his rivals in winning states or coming close is a function of Romney's weakness, not their strength. Romney needs to change that view in the coming weeks, although the immediate calendar – caucuses in Kansas and Hawaii, and primaries in Alabama and Mississippi – will afford him little opportunity to do so.

That's why he needs help from others, who can begin to spread the argument that his advisers made Wednesday about the delegate math, or who can affect the money flowing toward Gingrich and Santorum and their super Pacs.

None of this is easy, and it may not even be possible. Who can persuade Sheldon Adelson to stop writing multimillion-dollar checks to Gingrich's super PAC? Who can slow the tide of grass-roots money going to Santorum? Only Romney winning might begin to make all that happen. That's what many Republicans are waiting to see. For now, Romney appears to be mostly on his own.

Trump has been working on a national robo-call – a type of automated message – for the Romney campaign, taking his efforts for Romney from focused states with upcoming contests to an all 50 states approach. "Conversations continue with the Romney campaign managers seeking Mr Trump's continued assistance in states to ensure additional Romney victories," said [Trump executive vice president and special counsel Michael] Cohen.

If we look at how much the candidates have spent so far from their campaign accounts, we get another way of looking at the race. Through the most recent disclosure, the Romney campaign has spent $55m to date. The Gingrich campaign has spent $16m. The Paul campaign has spent $29m. And the Santorum campaign has spent about $5m.

So how much has the entire Romney campaign spent per vote received? $17.14, which is a lot more than the $2.54 that Santorum spent, or the $9.05 that Gingrich has spent, and only topped by the $31.55 that Paul spent.

On this basis Rick Santorum is doing incredibly well on just $2.54 a vote. And Ron Paul is seriously under-performing at $31.55 a vote.

Many in the media are trying to paint Romney's lack of strength in traditional Republican areas as a weakness. And yes, I'm sure Romney would prefer to be winning among all groups. But consider the alternative: he could be capturing the nomination by emerging victorious only among conservatives and in "traditional Republican" areas. Would that be better?

The point is that whether or not he wins Alabama, for example, the state will give Nominee Romney its electoral college votes come November.

But that's not the real problem. The real problem is enthusiasm and grassroots support: and Enten points out that Romney's share of the Republican vote is similar to George Bush's in 2004.